Reflections on the Revised Common Lectionary Texts

Month: March 2016

During the Season of Eastertide, our first readings are not from the Old Testament but rather the Book of Acts—the beginnings of the believers’ story after the Resurrection. All of a sudden this seemingly bumbling and clueless band of disciples that had followed Jesus around all through the Gospels suddenly seems to “get it”. But remember, too, that earlier in Acts (our Pentecost story), the Holy Spirit had come upon them. They were not alone but were empowered by faith in the Resurrected Christ. They were, in effect, becoming the church. Walter Brueggemann writes that “in the Book of Acts the church is a restless, transformative agent at work for emancipation and well-being in the world.” (April 9, 2007, available at http://theolog.org/2007/04/brueggemann-sermon-starter.html.)

Now they feel compelled to speak the Truth as they see it, even when the act of speaking the Truth is a dangerous one. They speak of Jesus as one in the same as the One and only Lord, God Almighty. And obeying and speaking this truth is above all human authority. Peter and the apostles understood that with the Resurrection of Christ, they were to look to new leadership. They were to follow Christ, rather than the political and religious leaders that were in place in the society.

Now it is important to not begin to fall into this account as one religion against another. This is NOT the Christians vs. the Jews the way some of our Christian brothers and sisters may try to make it. In fact, “Christianity”, per se is essentially a movement within the established faith. Peter is speaking here with the “authority of our ancestors”. He is speaking from the tradition of his people—his Jewish people. Think of it more as a “family feud” or a difference in belief. The words “to Israel” are important. This is not the beginnings of a religious war between two opposing faiths. Here, both sides were convinced that their truth was THE Truth. But it is not unlike our own setting with our own internal struggles between conservative and progressive, traditional and contemporary, right and left, or whatever designations you care to use to fill in the blanks.

Here, Peter was a witness. We know the end of the story. He and others are martyred for their belief. But the important part is that Peter was a witness, doing what all of us are called to do as followers of Christ.

I think it’s important to note, though, that being a “witness” does not call one to be mean-spirited or to wound others who do not think the same way in the process. Peter and the disciples still viewed themselves as part of those to whom they were speaking. They were not pulling away; they were not dismissing them as “wrong” or “evil” or anything else. They were trying to open the conversation of faith. But, of course, they were having to do it with authorities that had the upper hand.

There are those that will see the Scripture as a call to “war” between the so-called “secular humanists” and (I would say) so-called “people of faith”. J. Michael Krech says this in response to that:

[Some people] will see as heir to Peter’s boldness the public high school valedictorian who inserts a prayer into her speech at graduation, despite being warned by the school principal not to do so, thus obeying God rather than human authority. Other Christians will see as closer to the spirit of Peter the protesters whose placards and chants of “No War for Oil” break up a congressional committee hearing on Department of Defense appropriations.

In nations where governments are fairly chosen by the will of the people and orderly processes exist to hear grievances, it may be appropriate that the protesters who interrupt a congressional committee’s proceedings be removed from the room. In nations where the constitution and national heritage encourage mutual respect for people of various faiths and those who hold no religious faith at all, the school principal is correct. Praying your prayer to a captive audience at a public school graduation is not an act of courage but of bad manners…

When [one] speaks with the boldness of Peter and the other apostles, it does, at least over time, encourage hearers to take principled if unpopular stands in the workplace and helps lead us all to be seekers of truth and agents of reconciliation. (J. Michael Krech, in Feasting on the Word, David L. Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor, eds. “Second Sunday of Easter”, p. 381, 383.)

What is your response to this passage?

Our new United Methodist vows of membership themselves call us to vow our “prayers, our presence, our gifts, our service, and our witness”. What does that mean to you to be called as a witness?

Why is that so difficult in today’s society?

What does it mean that we are called to be “transformative agents”, as Brueggemann said?

This passage is the beginning of what was essentially a formal letter for that time and two-thirds of our passage for this week is essentially the salutation for that letter. The writer named John begins by wishing his readers grace and peace from God. He describes God as “the One who is”, sort of like the Old Testament tradition of God interpreting God’s own name as “I am who I am.” The “one who is and who is to come” presents the timelessness, the eternity, of God. It also speaks to that “already and not yet” characteristic of the Kingdom of God.

The number “seven” (used here for the cities and for the spirits) is intended to mean perfect or complete. The seven churches are named later in this collection known as the Book of Revelation, but it is possible that at the beginning, he was representing all the churches of western Asia minor (modern-day Turkey). Perhaps the writer is trying to depict a God that is beyond what we can imagine, beyond the limits of one human. And once again, we have the depiction of God as the ruler over all, one in our midst, always with us, guiding us. So, in the beginning—God, in the end—God, and throughout it all—God. God’s presence and power transcend all human notions of time. And Jesus Christ, the third figure named in the greeting, is also presented with three corresponding titles—the “faithful witness” (in his ministry, death and resurrection), the “firstborn of the dead” (vanquishing death), and “the ruler of the kings of the earth” (a new sovereignty on the earth.)

Remember that this Revelation was written at least a generation or two after Jesus’ death and Resurrection. The Christian faith was already solidified. And once again, the passage draws to the witness of that faith. There was a definite disparity for those early believers between being “Easter people” and living in the realities of what was often a harsh and cruel world. They were being persecuted and they needed a way to make sense of their faith. Revelation was written to encourage those Christians who were struggling to have faith in light of everything around them when evil seemed to be the only thing at work in the world. It was intended to bring a vision of hope to those whose only way to be “safe in their faith” was to abandon it altogether.

And for those of us who have left the beauty and glory that was Easter morning, with the more than full sanctuary, the beautiful flower arrangements, the “Hallelujah Chorus”, and the high-church celebration, now what? We are not persecuted for our faith, but it is indeed hard. It is hard to stay faithful when there are so many things that tug at your life. And, how in the world do we follow that exhibition on Easter morning? How do we top that? What next?

To understand Revelation for our day, we have to understand the nature of hope. For Christians hope is not a wish. It is not a tooth under a pillow, or fingers crossed or just one more Publisher’s Clearinghouse Sweepstakes try. Hope for a Christian is an assurance, a firm and binding promise. It is a sure thing. Hope is not a feeling. It is a fact. It is a fact rooted in the reality of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ and assured by the amazing, steadfast, unshakable love of God for God’s people. God will not be shaken. Hope is independent of circumstances and it will never be conquered by evil. Even if hurt seems to be winning, the battle for God has already been won.

Several years ago when I was a pastor in the Denver Colorado area, a colleague of mine told me a story of a friend of hers who was traveling home to Denver on a Sunday afternoon from a conference north along the front range of the Rocky Mountains in Fort Collins. The conference had been a good one. The man and the woman were driving home full of what they had learned and talking about how they might use their new learning in their work situations. As they rounded a curve in the road they came upon a serious motorcycle accident. The motorcycle seemed to catch on something and flip into the air. The driver, without a helmet, was thrown fifty yards or so, and the bike landed not far away.

The two were the first to arrive. The man was driving and pulled off the road just north of the accident. Before he shut off the ignition the woman was out of the car and running to the side of the accident victim. The man stopped another car and sent the occupants for help while he began to try to direct traffic. At one point in the chaos he glanced at the woman. She was crouched next to the unconscious young man, stroking his hair and talking to him.

When the ambulance arrived and the young man was whisked away, the man and the woman got back into their car in silence. There was blood on the woman’s hands and around the hem of her skirt.

After a moment, the man said, “I saw you talking to that young man. He was obviously unconscious. He may even have been dead. What could you possibly have been saying to him?”

“I just told him over and over,” she replied, “I just told him, the worst is over. The healing has already begun.”

To those long ago hurting ones to whom John wrote, to those long ago ones whose lives were marked by pain and fear, by weakness and oppression of injustice and death, whose lives were marked by the terror of the now and haunted by the past and uncertain of the future, to those ones and to us, to you, God through the words of Revelation offers us a vision of a brand new life; a life lived in a brand new order in a brand new way. Maybe the images in Revelation are frightening and confusing to you, serpents and lakes of fire, but what is that to us? What God has to say in this letter is that no matter what comes against you in this life; no matter if all of the power of pain and chaos of the universe seems to overtake you all at once; no matter if you can not control one single thing or fix one single thing in your life, the worst is over, the healing has already begun. The lamb is on the throne. Come Lord Jesus, come. (From “Saltwater Apocalypse”, a sermon by Rev. Eugenia Gamble, November 16, 1997, available at http://day1.org/821-saltwater_apocalypse.)

What meaning does this passage hold for you?

What does this passage say about the calling to “witness”?

What does it mean to embody Christ, to embody Easter, to become “Easter people”?

You have to wonder what the disciples were thinking locked behind the door of their house. Were they afraid that they would be next? Were they disillusioned that things had turned out that way? Were they feeling remorse or guilt or shame at the parts that they had played (or not played, as the case may be) in the Passion Play? I suppose it’s possible that they were a little afraid of the rumors that Jesus HAD returned. After all, what would he say to THEM?

But that’s not what happened. Things were going to be OK. Jesus was back. The disciples rejoiced. Jesus breathed the Holy Spirit into them. They were sent. They became the community of Christ. And so I supposed they went off merrily praising God and being who they were called to be. This is a premise for discipleship. Jesus offered light and truth through his relationship with God. Now the disciples are called to offer light and truth through their relationship with Christ. All except Thomas. Poor Thomas. He wanted to see proof. Why couldn’t he just believe?

On one level, Jesus, with all the grace that Christ offers, gives Thomas exactly what Thomas so desperately needs—proof. Thomas missed his initial opportunity, but Jesus returns. I think we give Thomas a bad wrap—after all, for some reason, he missed what the others had seen. (It is interesting that he was apparently the only one who had ventured outside!) He just wanted the same opportunity—and Jesus gave that to him. He wanted to experience it. The point was that the Resurrection is not a fact to be believed, but an experience to be shared. And perhaps, part of that experience is doubt. Constructive doubt is what forms the questions in us and leads us to search and explore our own faith understanding. It is doubt that compels us to search for greater understanding of who God is and who we are as children of God.

Hans Kung is a Swiss-born theologian and writer. He says it like this: Doubt is the shadow cast by faith. One does not always notice it, but it is always there, though concealed. At any moment it may come into action. There is no mystery of the faith which is immune to doubt. Isn’t that a wonderful thought? Doubt is the shadow cast by faith. Faith in the resurrection does not exclude doubt, but takes doubt into itself. It is a matter of being part of this wonderful community of disciples not because God told us to but because our doubts bring us together. Examining our faith involves doubts, it requires us to learn the questions to ask. And it is in the face of doubt that our faith is born. God does not call us to a blind, unexamined faith, accepting all that we see and all that we hear as unquestionable truth; God instead calls us to an illumined doubt, through which we search and journey toward a greater understanding of God.

Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to belief. (Remember that ALL the disciples had seen Jesus. Thomas just wanted a more tangible showing. The only one in John’s Gospel that really saw nothing was the so-called “Beloved Disciple”, who ran to the tomb and saw nothing.) They have the relationship in Christ to which God calls us. They understand the Christian community—you come together and hold on for dear life as you search for a greater understanding of something that will always be a mystery. But what an incredible mystery it is! And we are given the grace to embrace it.

Frederick Buechner preached a sermon on this text entitled “The Seeing Heart”. In it, he reminds us of Thomas’ other name, the “Twin”. It was never really clear why he was called that, but Buechner says that “if you want to know who the other twin is, I can tell you. I am the other twin and, unless I miss my guess, so are you.” He goes on to say this:

I don’t know of any story in the Bible that is easier to imagine ourselves into than this one from John’s Gospel because it is a story about trying to believe in Jesus in a world that is as full of shadows and ambiguities and longings and doubts and glimmers of holiness as the room where the story takes place is and as you and I are inside ourselves…To see Jesus with the heart is to know that in the long run his kind of life is the only life worth living. To see him with the heart is not only to believe in him but little by little to become bearers to each other of his healing life until we become fully healed and whole and alive within ourselves. To see him with the heart is to take heart, to grow true hearts, brave hearts, at last. (“The Seeing Heart”, by Frederic Buechner, in Secrets in the Dark: A Life in Sermons)

What meaning does this passage hold for you?

What does doubt mean in your faith life?

What does community mean in your faith life?

What is your response to the notion that those who have not seen and yet have come to belief are the Blessed?

What, then, does it mean to have a “seeing heart”?

Some Quotes for Further Reflection:

I believe in the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth…and the resurrection of the body…as it was meant to be, the fragmented self made new; so that at the end of time all Creation will be One. Well, maybe I don’t exactly believe it, but I know it, and knowing is what matters…The strange turning of what seemed to be a horrendous No to a glorious Yes is always the message of Easter. (Madeleine L’Engle)

The beginning of wisdom is found in doubting; by doubting we come to the question, and by seeking we may come upon the truth. (Pierre Abelard, 12th century)

But the proclamation of Easter Day is that all is well…In the end, [God’s] will, not ours, is done. Love is the victor. Death is not the end. The end is life. His life and our lives through him, in him. Existence has greater depths of beauty, mystery, and benediction than the wildest visionary has ever dared to dream. Christ our Lord has risen! (Frederick Buechner, “The End is Life”, in Bread and Wine: Readings for Lent and Easter, 292)

Closing

Yours—we gladly attest—is the kingdom, the power, and the glory. Yours—we gladly assert—are the heavens and the earth. It is you who had made all that is, sun, moon, stars, rivers, forests, minerals, birds, beasts, fish—and us. We say, “in your image.” Yours the kingdom and the power and the glory—and then us.

You do not will us to be powerless either, so you endow us with the power to work, to rule, to govern. We reflect you in our working, in our ruling, in our governing. Ours is the chance for justice and/or injustice, for mercy and/or rigor, for peace and/or war. We grow accustomed to our power, sometimes absolutizing, and then we are interrupted by the doxology on which we have bet everything:

Yours is the kingdom, the power, and the glory. And we are glad. Amen. (“On Creation”, by Walter Brueggeman, in Prayers for a Privileged People, p. 165)

This week is a little different. I did both the Palm Liturgy Gospel passage and the Passion Liturgy Old Testament and Epistle. Rather than writing reflections for the Passion Gospel, I’ll post a separate post for the Holy Week lectionary.

It is interesting that half of this story is about getting the mode of transportation—where to go to find the animal, what to do, what to say. You can imagine what the disciples were thinking. For this we left our fishing nets? Surely they imagined a grander assignment. But this seems to be an important thing in every account of this story. Perhaps it is a reminder that sometimes following Jesus means doing mundane tasks that, alone, do not seem important, but in the grand scheme of things, are paramount to the story. There is some significance, though, to the idea of him riding a colt that has never been ridden. (Similar to coming into the world through a virgin womb.) Jesus is different. It has never been done this way before.

Here, though, Jesus is in the bustling capital city. He is no longer in the villages and open country of his home. The celebratory parade is also a protest march. The disciples should have known what was happening. Jesus had already laid it out for them. But they still did not comprehend what he had said. At this moment Jesus begins the sharp descent down the Mt. of Olives, winding his way toward Jerusalem. The road is a steep decline into the Garden of Gethsemane and then begins to ascend toward Mt. Moriah and the place of the temple.

At this moment, the crowd sees him as a king, as one who will get them out of where they are. So this is a parade that befits a king. “Hosanna”, “the Coming One”, the one who restores Jerusalem. He enters. This is the moment. This is it. What they didn’t recognize is that Jesus brought them something that they had never had before—peace, truth, justice, and love. What they didn’t recognize is that Jesus had indeed come to restore them not to what was but to what should’ve been all along.

But in this account, the ones who are the “religious ones”, the leaders, seem embarrassed at this show of affection. “Make them stop,” they order Jesus. (“Be quiet”, “mind your manners”, “act in a way befitting and acceptable of a rabbi”.) The response: “If they were silent, the stones themselves would shout out.” In other words, if we do not speak, if we do not change, the stones would bear marks of the result. (And they did. In the days when this Gospel would have been written, the stones of the temple and the courtyard would have borne the marks of its destruction.) It is a call to cry out, even when there are those in the world and those in the church who want to silence you.

The miracle of the Red Sea,” the rabbis taught, “is not the parting of the waters. The miracle of the Red Sea is that with a wall of water on each side of him, the first Jew walked through.” The implications are clear: God is not in this alone. Yes, God may be all-powerful and eternally unfailing, but that’s not the point. The real key to the coming of the reign of God on earth, the rabbis imply, is not God’s fidelity. The real determinant between what ought to be and what will be in this world is the mettle of our own unflagging faith that the God who leads us to a point of holy wakefulness stays with us through it to the end. The key to what happens on earth does not lie in God’s will. All God can do is part the waters. It lies in the courage we bring to the parting of them. It lies in deciding whether or not we will walk through the parting waters of our own lives today. Just as surely as there was need for courage at the Red Sea, just as surely as there was need for courage on Jesus’ last trip to Jerusalem, there is need for it here and now, as well.

The Waters part all around us, too, now. The road to Jerusalem is clear. We are surrounded by situations that have solutions without solvers with the political will to resolve them: The old cannot afford their prescriptions. The young have no food. The middle-aged work two jobs and slip silently into poverty whatever their efforts. The globe turns warmer and more vulnerable by the day…Racism, sexism and homophobia destroy families and poison relationships. The mighty buy more guns. The powerful pay fewer taxes. The national infrastructure slips into disrepair. Fundamentalist groups and governments everywhere seek to suppress opposition, to deny questions, to resist change, to block development. We are all on the road to Jerusalem again; some of us dedicated to restoring a long lost past; others committed to creating a better future…

But there are those others who keep on shouting, who keep on telling the story even to those with no ears to hear. Over and over again they cry out. But is it worth it? And does it work? Did the disciples on the road to Jerusalem make any difference at all? Well, look at it this way: It got our attention, didn’t it? So whose turn is it to cry out this time? ( Sr. Joan Chittister, “The Road to Jerusalem is Clear: Meditations on Lent”, National Catholic Reporter, March 30, 2001, available at http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1141/is_22_37/ai_72960610/?tag=content;col1, accessed 24 March, 2010.)

Chapters 40-55 of the book that we know as Isaiah probably address a time late in the Babylonian exile, when the prophet proclaims that God wants the people to return to Jerusalem. Keep in mind, though, that it has been years since the beginning of the exile. Most of the older generation, those who remember the way it was before, are gone. The next generation had created a new life here. They were settled, comfortable, and many had established themselves and even grown their wealth. And now they’re being asked to return to a city that is in complete desolation. There is nothing there. There was really nothing to which they could return.

This passage is known as the third of the Servant Songs, declaring what the task of the servant should be. The servant speaks straight after God has made the claims that he has the power to deliver Israel from their unfaithfulness. In contradiction to the unfaithful and unhearing Israel, the servant declares that he is obedient and listens to the Lord. The servant is totally confident that God is with him despite all those who have been actively opposed to his ministry and the consequent adversity. This supreme confidence in the presence of God allows the servant to face any future adversity. The call of the servant is to make sense of what happened so that the people will again hear and return to faithfulness. There is a lot here about both teaching and hearing. They go together.

The prophet or servant has been faithful in teaching what has been transmitted to him and that teaching will sustain the weary. In spite of the fact that many insist that this is a precursor passage to the Christ event, we have no clear answers about the identity of the servant in Isaiah 40-55 and can only wonder if his message was so unpopular that he suffered because of it. Certainly other prophets, such as Jeremiah, suffered. His suffering and response is depicted in a different way – Jeremiah gets angry with God and wants his adversaries punished. Many Biblical scholars claim that the servant is the embodiment of Israel herself, both the land and the people; in other words, the servant is indicative of any servant of God (including, then, us). The servant, the people, in fact, WE, are called to confront the evil and suffering of the world rather than dismiss it as not “of God”. It is to these parts of Creation that we are called to help bring redemption and new life.

As we are celebrating Palm Sunday there is no doubt that we can identify Jesus with the words of the Isaiah 50:4-9 in which Jesus has had to face and will face his tormentors. He sets his face towards Jerusalem, riding in with the knowledge that the crowds could easily be fickle. Jesus has relied on God to sustain him and he continues to rely on the help of God. But even in the face of adversaries, God sustains him. It is not that God “fixes” it, but rather walks with us through it.

What is your response to this passage?

What vision of the future does that give for your own life?

How often do we really believe this or do we assume that God will “fix” it? What is the difference for our faith?

If you interpret the servant as the embodiment of all servants of God, what does that mean for you?

On the surface, being of the “same mind” as Jesus would mean to be like Jesus, or to think like Jesus. But it means more than that. It is a call, rather, to enter the very essence that is Jesus. It is a call to pattern our lives after Christ.

It appears here that “being in the form of God” may be opposite from “being in the form of a slave”. Essentially, Jesus emptied himself and became dependent upon God, fully surrendered, a servant of God. He became fully human. He surrendered self-advancement and instead became fully human, fully made in God’s image.

This passage is the story of salvation in three parts—emptying and incarnation, obedience and death, exaltation and resurrection. Jesus sees his equality with God not as Lordship to be used over others, but as an offering for others. We are to have the same mind of Christ the humbled, Christ the crucified, rather than the crucifiers. We are to, once again, walk through shame and suffering knowing that the Lord is with us. And we are to do it with a rhythm that is unfamiliar to the world.

Our main problem is that surrender is really pretty foreign to us. We tend to equate it with losing and we never want to do that in our world of win-win. The notion of “surrender” is uncomfortable for us. Literally, it means to give up one’s self, to resign or yield to another. It could even mean to suffer. That is against our grain. That doesn’t fit in with our dreams of pursuing security and success. That doesn’t reconcile with a society driven by competition and power and “getting ahead”. Surrender…doesn’t that mean to lose control? What will happen then?

Jean-Pierre de Caussade wrote that “what God requires of the soul is the essence of self-surrender…[and] what the soul desires to do is done as in the sight of God.” The 18th century mystic understood that one’s physical being and one’s spiritual being, indeed one’s body and one’s soul, could not be separated. The two were interminably intertwined and, then, the essence and status of one affected the other directly.

So what does that mean? We sing the old song “I Surrender All” with all of the harmonic gesture we can muster. And we truly do want to surrender to God—as long as we can hold on to the grain of our own individualism, to that which we think makes us who we are. But de Caussade is claiming that it is our soul that truly makes us who we are and that in order to be whole, our soul desires God with all of its being. So, in all truth, that must mean that most of us live our lives with a certain dissonance between our physical and spiritual being. We want to be with God. We love God. We need God. But total surrender? But that is what our soul desires and in order for there to be that harmony in our lives, our physical beings must follow suit.

Lent teaches us that. This season of emptying, of fasting, of stripping away those things that separate us from God, this season of turning around is the season that teaches us how to finally listen to our soul. It is the season that teaches us that surrendering to God is not out of weakness or last resignation, but out of desire for God and the realization that it is there that we belong. In an article entitled “Moving From Solitude to Community to Ministry”, Henri Nouwen tells the story of a river:

The little river said, “I can become a big river.” It worked hard, but there was a big rock. The river said, “I’m going to get around this rock.” The little river pushed and pushed, and since it had a lot of strength, it got itself around the rock. Soon the river faced a big wall, and the river kept pushing this wall. Eventually, the river made a canyon and carved a way through. The growing river said, “I can do it. I can push it. I am not going to let down for anything.” Then there was an enormous forest. The river said, “I’ll go ahead anyway and just force these trees down.” And the river did. The river, now powerful, stood on the edge of an enormous desert with the sun beating down. The river said, “I’m going to go through this desert.” But the hot sand soon began to soak up the whole river. The river said, “Oh, no. I’m going to do it. I’m going to get myself through this desert.” But the river soon had drained into the sand until it was only a small mud pool. Then the river heard a voice from above: “Just surrender. Let me lift you up. Let me take over.” The river said, “Here I am.” The sun then lifted up the river and made the river into a huge cloud. He carried the river right over the desert and let the cloud rain down and made the fields far away fruitful and rich.

There is a moment in our life when we stand before the desert and want to do it ourselves. But there is the voice that comes, “Let go. Surrender. I will make you fruitful. Yes, trust me. Give yourself to me.”

What meaning does this passage hold for you?

What, for you, does it mean to assume the mind of Jesus?

What does it mean to surrender to God? Why is that so difficult for us?

What does this passage say to you about humility?

What does this passage say to you about power?

Some Quotes for Further Reflection:

We must not allow ourselves to become like the system we oppose. (Bishop Desmond Tutu)

Thou shalt not be a victim. Thou shalt not be a perpetrator. Above all, thou shalt not be a bystander. (Holocaust Museum, Washington D.C.)

Truth is not only violated by falsehood; it may be equally outraged by silence. (Henri-Frederic Amiel, 19th cent.)

He drew a circle that shut me out, Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout. But Love and I had the wit to win, We drew a circle that took him in. (Edward Markham)

Closing

We’re good at planning! Give us a task force and a project and we’re off and running! No trouble at all! Going to the village and finding the colt, even negotiating with the owners is right down our alley. And how we love a parade! In a frenzy of celebration we gladly focus on Jesus and generously throw our coats and palms in his path. And we can shout praise loudly enough to make the Pharisees complain. It’s all so good!

It’s between parades that we don’t do we well. From Sunday to Sunday we forget our hosannas. Between parades the stones will have to shout because we don’t. (“Between Parades”, Ann Weems, Kneeling in Jerusalem, (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1992.), 69.)

About Journey to Penuel

After Jacob wrestled with God, we are told that he named the place Peniel ("I have wrestled with God"). And the place is called Penuel ("We have wrestled with God.")
This is a blog of weekly reflections on the Revised Common Lectionary Texts. I hope that, like Jacob and others, you will question and wrestle until you see the face of God.

Come, O thou Traveller unknown, Whom still I hold, but cannot see! My company before is gone, And I am left alone with Thee; With Thee all night I mean to stay, And wrestle till the break of day. (Charles Wesley)

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